1. Technical Field
The disclosed technology relates to the field of persistent virtual environments.
2. Background Art
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are becoming increasingly popular with subscribers in the millions. In many of these games (especially in the role-playing subgenre, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs)), an online social relationship is established between avatars controlled by separate players (and sometimes the online social relationship transfers to the players themselves—although a player can have a stable of avatars that can be played to have significantly different personas). The establishment of these online social relationships is an important part of the game experience. Thus, MMOGs are often designed to encourage interactions between avatars. Some of these interaction encouraging techniques include providing support for guilds, clans, cities, professions, or other player association, built in delays to encourage inter-avatar interaction, and for “friend” or “enemy” lists. This support includes the ability to know which entities that have an established online social relationship are virtually present in the persistent virtual environment at the same time.
A player may wish to have his/her avatar propose a joint activity with another player's avatar to establish or maintain an online social relationship. Player associations often organize shared adventures for the avatars in the association. One of the difficulties with establishing online social relationships is that players in the “real-world” have work, family, and other obligations that affect when their avatars can be virtually present and controlled by the players (some MMOGs allow an avatar to be controlled by a program or macro that allow the avatar to be present in the persistent virtual environment, but without any meaningful ability to establish or maintain an online social relationship—thus, the player is not virtually present). In addition, players from any real-world time zone can login to the persistent virtual environment at some real-world time zone time. Once logged in, their avatars are subject to the virtual time in the MMOG. Thus, a player from New York who works during the daytime will find it difficult to develop an online social relationship with a player from Paris who works during the daytime.
It is difficult to establish or maintain an online social relationship between avatars who are not predictably virtually present in the persistent virtual environment at the same game-time. Further the MMOGs do not provide any mechanism to allow one player to know which avatars are usually virtually present with the player.
It is also difficult to schedule time to maintain an online social relationship as one player has no automatic way of knowing when another player is likely to be virtually present. Thus, the players must coordinate future interactions via in-game chat when the players are virtually present or via in-game email.
Published U.S. Patent Application No. US 2004/0039630 A1 entitled Method and System for Inferring and Applying Coordination Patterns from Individual Work and Communication Activity to Begole et al. teaches gathering real-world information that allows them to infer that a person is following a cycle. In comparison, the technology disclosed herein tracks when a player is virtually present, assumes that the player follows a virtually present cycle, and analyzes the strength of the cycle to determine its ability to predict whether a player will be virtually present in the future.
It would be advantageous to capture a player's temporal profile within the persistent virtual environment and to be able to help a player find other entities who have temporal profiles that match the player's temporal profile to simplify the establishment of online social relationships. In addition, it would be advantageous to be able to predict when a specific player is expected to be virtually present without needing to communicate with that player. Furthermore, it would be advantageous to be able to characterize players such that the persistent virtual environment itself can explicitly encourage players with similar temporal profiles to establish an online social relationship.